Great; thanks. I suspected there was more -- or in this case less (unless this is a cover-up; I never trust any media or government fully) -- to this story than the initial buzz, since it wasn't making front page news. You've saved me some digging.

Now AP had updated their story ( http://tinyurl.com/3y6k55p ), and we're back in the very well-funded cyberwarfare mode. No surprise at the conflicting reports; this latest one, as of last night, reports that this is one of the most secret programs in the U.S., and they name half a dozen other nations that could be behind it. Every report I can find still supports this version of the story, that this is a new weapon, regarded as deliberate, broad, independent of the internet, state sponsored, and extremely sophisticated. It's apparently a shotgun approach, aimed by the light of statistics rather than night vision scopes, satellite data, spies, onsite fire controllers, etc. It thus hits many industrial plants, but its effects are concentrated on factors which help it zero in on Iran's industrial, and particularly their nuclear, programs. Its broad scope makes it much harder to isolate and tougher to defend against.

That ... or it was simply poorly aimed. Its sophistication implies the former, and the conveniently omitted source of the claim that the worm hit only Iranian lab workers’ laptops was … Ta Daa … the head of the Iranian lab ... who, BTW, now admits it hit their nuclear plant.

Conceptually, it sounds to me, based on my career in advanced weapons development including cutting edge software and heuristics, like a system designed to strike targets that possess Characteristic A (e.g., uses Siemens AG software) OR Char B (e.g., uses certain Microsoft programs) OR Char C (e.., the nature of the plant) ... OR ... hell, Char D could be "operated by guys in beards" or "all male employees" for all we know; our military has found far more subtle identifiable markers through pattern recognition research I was part of back in the 1960s. Being so broadly targeted, a system like this would (and this one did) hit unintended targets around the globe ... classic collateral damage. HOWEVER, this very nature of the weapon means that a target possessing Char A AND Char B AND Char C ... see where this is going? ... would get hit hardest (not unlike some types of internet search engines); Boolean logic at its finest. That's exactly what appears to have happened. Proof of anything I’ve speculated? No. Reinforcement? Yep.

I miss the more direct access to real news I had when I was on active duty (especially when my job included gathering and directing the flow of information in both directions between the global media and our huge SDI weapons research lab); even though limited by sheer quantity and its often classified nature, it really gave me insight into just how bad most of the media are in gathering and wildly distorting -- often deliberately -- facts they don’t understand. Other, much more recent, examples make it clear that this problem is getting much worse, not better.

Salt Lake Tribune headlines: “Another Tomahawk Cruise Missile Crashes in Utah Desert”.
Facts: DUH! We had replaced their soft-recovery parachutes with laboratory instrumentation to analyze their performance, including impact point accuracy, on our missile firing range. They didn't "crash"; they hit their targets.

L.A. Times Headlines: “Star Wars on Indefinite Hold”
Facts: A smoldering fire in an office trash can left some smoke particles on one of dozens of laser mirrors. It had just happened a thousand miles away, so we weren’t sure yet whether it might take hours or days to clean that mirror.

Why does anyone blindly accept the technophobic, politically biased, lazy, English-major boobs who write the stuff handsome anchors read to us on the telly or news sources print as fact?

Those would be the advanced weapons that contractors got paid huge fees for that never hit a target? Nothing quite like iso--never saw a defense contract he didn't support, a fight he didn't want to pick--or a tax he thought was worthwhile paying.

,..conveniently omitted source of the claim that the worm hit only Iranian lab workers’ laptops was … Ta Daa … the head of the Iranian lab ... who, BTW, now admits it hit their nuclear plant. "

it says only this.
"The head of the Bushehr nuclear plant in Iran said Sunday that the worm had affected only the personal computers of staff members,"
Same as the other report. The first article did not say that claim was made by the Iranians but that seems kinda obvious when you get "news" from inside a Irani nuke plant.

Interesting post about the news and inside line facts from iso

I like the way these articles speculate that a program this powerful could only be written by one of six gov.
All the most powerful programs MS Windows, Mac OS, Adobe were written by private guys, partly in their parents garages. Same for the most deadly virus attacks. If I were picking, I would choose one of the really smart people among Irani expats. They are the cream of Irani expertise and their friends work in every tech area in Iran. You had to carry that flash drive in... The other speculations don't fit the facts well. Deployment was amateur. The weapon has shown no ill effects and hit Siemens everywhere, and the Iranis are on to it. Nice try Iran Freedom guys You rock!!

Now it's emerging from the State Department that the Stuxnet attack set back Iran's nuclear weapon program by two or more years -- at least as much as would have an Israeli air attack. Its source is reportedly either the U.S. or Israel, more likely the latter.

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